The Kaiju shall rise again!

Rating: 10/10 (22 July 2013)

For "kaiju-eiga" (Japanese monster movie) fan-boys, "Pacific Rim" has been one of the most eagerly anticipated summer blockbusters for several years now, and for good reason. Due to the passing of legendary special effects artist Ray Harryhausen earlier this year (the film is dedicated to his memory and that of famous Japanese movie director Ishiro Honda - who passed away 20 years ago in 1993), the failure of "Godzilla" in 1998, and the reasonable successes of the American found footage/monster flick "Cloverfield" in 2008 and South Korea's "The Host" in 2006, the monster-on-the-rampage genre has seen some increased relevancy, and legitimacy, in the last decade.
As someone who grew up with, and idolized, Godzilla and other famed Japanese movie monsters - Ishiro Honda's "Gojira" (1954), Godzilla's dark, gloomy black & white debut, remains the greatest monster movie ever - "Pacific Rim" was the first movie I've seen in the movie theater this year, and it was a choice that was well-worth my hard-earned $7.50. I also belong to a Godzilla fan-boy group on Facebook. Upon the release of "Pacific Rim" on July 12, 2013, the page ignited with impassioned fan-boy discussions of what could easily be considered the greatest giant monster movie so far this millennium (if ever, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here - "Gojira" is still the best this genre has to offer). I'm inclined to agree.
I greatly admired J.J. Abrams's take on the monster movie genre with "Cloverfield," and I thought that "The Host" was a welcome surprise from one of the last places to pop up on the world cinema market. Now with "Pacific Rim," famed Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's big-budget take on the genre (as well as serving as a delightful homage to his childhood fan-boy obsessions in comic books, Godzilla, Japanese Anime', pop culture, and fantasy) has arrived.
Equal parts "Avatar" (2009), "District 9" (2009), 1998 "Godzilla," Iron Man, "Top Gun" (1986), "Transformers," and del Toro's own fervent imagination (together with co-screenwriter Travis Beacham), and featuring an epic score by Ramin Djawadi (which comes close to rivaling the best of the famous Japanese film composer Akira Ifukube), "Pacific Rim" begins sometime in the near-future, when mankind is at war with giant, other-worldly sea monsters called "Kaiju" (the Japanese word for "monster") bent on our destruction. To combat them, we have the Jaegers (the German word for "hunter"), 250-foot-tall heavily armed, heavily armored giant robots that are piloted by two people who mind meld to form a single unified consciousness - the better to operate them and fight the Kaiju, we're told.
The film's strongest visual appeal comes from the giant monster-robot battles that dominate the film's loudest moments (and pretty much the entire second half of the picture). In today's times, special effects no longer serve to simply enhance movie scenery - as they did in time's past - but essentially to create them. There are some movies in recent years where special effects - namely CGI - are used to create an entire movie and actors seem almost like an after-thought. In recalling the movie, I found it to be a relief that there seems to be a more intricate balance between the battle sequences and the scenes with the flesh & blood human characters.
And we get some truly likable, flesh & blood human characters in the form of a jaded former ace Jaeger pilot named Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), who is called back into the line of duty to once again combat the Kaiju threat; also on-board is his former chief, the hard-nosed Stacker Pentecoast (Idris Elba), who lends the movie sex appeal and scenery-chewing military command presence; and lastly, there's the beautiful, ambitious Jaeger pilot-trainee Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi).
Backing them up, is their loyal, wise-cracking systems administrator Tendo Choi (Clifton Collins, Jr.), and a pair of goofy, bumbling Jaeger research scientists - Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day) and Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) - who make several fundamental discoveries about the Kaiju that may just turn the tide of the war in favor of humanity. And, it'll be impossible to miss him, but del Toro's regular go-to guy Ron Perlman (best known from del Toro's earlier "Hellboy" superhero movies and "Blade II") also shows up as a leather-skinned, back-alley Hong Kong black marketer named Hannibal Chau.
As a director and screenwriter, del Toro has always given his films rich character and thematic depth, and philosophical complexity (and not to mention a fine sense of humor, which many big-budget blockbusters these days often tend to lack); "Pacific Rim" does not rank up there with his most famous picture to date, "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006), but it's actually much closer to his aforementioned "Hellboy" films and "Blade II" (2002). It's a blockbuster movie, but one that is not without some degree of humanistic depth and merit. The film's core theme revolves around the benefits of working together - "two heads are better than one," as they say - and this is taken to a somewhat literal degree here, in which empathy (the ability to understand another person's feelings) is seen as a bona-fide superpower in and of itself that is capable of allowing just two people to power towering robots to effectively battle an unspeakable threat to humanity.
It is this purely humanistic touch that takes the spectacle away from the many dazzling special effects-driven action sequences that "Pacific Rim" has to offer and instead places it on the human characters at the center of it all. This is something that is purely at the center of much of Guillermo del Toro's best work.
10/10